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Steve Pomerance: Restoring public participation in Boulder's government

By Steve Pomerance

Posted:
08/02/2016 06:44:41 PM MDT

Updated:
08/02/2016 06:45:12 PM MDT

Steve Pomerance

The Boulder City Council is setting up a working group to improve how the "public" participates in its governance. This will be a big undertaking, since the process is flawed from top to bottom.

At the highest level, the lack of trust is evident. Citizens are asking, "Do the council and staff really work for us the citizens, or are they in it for themselves? Do they really value what we care about, or do they hold their personal goals and interests paramount?" This should not be an "either/or," but the current unacknowledged tension makes many citizens feel irrelevant, whether they are testifying at a council meeting, or are invited to participate in a staff-managed process.

I certainly have experienced this myself. There is an almost total lack of feedback when testifying at council or emailing the council on substantive issues. And even as an appointee to the city's working group on impact fees (an area where I'm a relative expert), when I identified significant flaws in the staff work, my observations were simply ignored. For example, I pointed out that certain land costs were not included in the fee calculations, even though they should have been according to standard practice and the consultant's own "buy-in" methodology. But my comments were disregarded; I may as well have not been there. Also ignored were serious flaws in transportation fee calculations and in the legal basis for the proposed jobs-housing linkage fees.

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The public participation process failure sometimes starts with flawed goal setting, like with the Housing Boulder project. Some of the original goals, rubber stamped by the council, were completely unrealistic, such as having a variety of housing types in every part of the city, or making every part of every neighborhood a 15-minute walk to open space, shopping, etc. Even though these two would have required a redesign of much of the city, they quickly became fixed in stone. This meant that citizens' comments were constrained so as not to threaten these poorly conceived notions, making many people feel like the outreach meetings were just for show.

People get very frustrated when the city doesn't acknowledge its mistakes. For example, the city said vehicle travel times on city arterial streets haven't increased over the last decades. But then a citizen observed in the Camera that in 2004 the staff stopped recording travel times when there was street maintenance, etc., so that the times before and after that date are not comparable. But the city never acknowledged this misrepresentation. The same thing happened with the staff's accident forecast analysis for the Folsom "rightsizing;" it was buried until after the debate, and no one acknowledged this failure.

The problems range from the obvious to the esoteric. On Saturday, the Camera carried a story about a city tour of existing and potential sites for the "homeless." It is glaringly obvious that this is a big issue in Boulder, and especially concerning for those who might end up being neighbors to these new facilities. But instead of arranging a second or third bus for those members of the public who wanted to attend, the city dissuaded them from "tagging along" — hardly an effective way to encourage participation.

On the esoteric side, I have pointed out, to no effect, a number of flawed staff legal analyses associated with election laws. These range from staff's misreading the state law regarding the title setting process for 300/301 last year, to removing a section of Boulder's code that previously prevented city contractors from contributing to council candidates' campaigns; even federal law prohibits such contributions for congressional elections, because of the obvious potential for graft.

The council's attempt to legalize "rental co-ops" has lacked any structured public process. As a result, essential questions have not been answered, such as how many illegal co-ops there are; the extent to which they are merely conveniences for relatively well-off people with itinerant lifestyles versus a real help for the less economically fortunate; what the resident count and turnover rate is; what quality of neighbors they are; where they could be located without major impacts; what the market for new ones is; etc.

When such problems and concerns are ignored after citizens have attempted to raise them, people reasonably conclude that the city is more interested in appearances than real feedback. So I suggest that a good start for this process would be to apply the "three up" rule that I used when I was on the council: When you screw up, own up and then clean it up.

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